Summary
The false tension around Greg’s imminent departure makes Rooster feel a bit tepid in “Ludlow’s Fourth Hottest Professor”, with a lot of focus being wasted on the least compelling storyline.
To say the show is called Rooster, it’s very much not about Rooster for depressingly large stretches. And given we’re right on the cusp of the first season finale – tempered, somewhat, by the fact that the show has already been renewed by HBO for Season 2 – the focus on Katie, Archie, and Sunny suggests that they’re going to be occupying a good deal of the finale’s focus. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m much less interested in this than whatever Greg is doing, and Episode 9, “Ludlow’s Fourth Hottest Professor”, doesn’t provide many solid counterarguments to my position.
This is perhaps because Greg’s departure is imminent, or at least the show is pretending it is, which isn’t quite the same thing. Even without the renewal, it would have been obvious that there’s still much more for Greg to do at Ludlow, including making sure Katie doesn’t torpedo her personal life any further, leading the hockey team to victory, and keeping Tommy in college. When you realise that the excuse the show has concocted for him to leave is a bit of a ruse, a lot of the potential tension fades away. It surprises me that anyone thought we’d buy it.
But with all this in mind, you can sort of tell why the focus is more on the love triangle. I’m just not invested, despite how much more effort this half-hour puts into not making Archie look awful. He’s at his lowest ebb here, mainlining Celsius to try and finish his gigantic book, only to then discover that it’s probably not going to get published. This isn’t going to make you feel sorry for Archie, since he cancels classes while he’s working, sacrificing the students’ futures on the altar of his own ego, and then only reassembles the group for a seminar to heap praise on the finished manuscript. Even the most minor and obvious constructive criticism – that it’s much too long, for instance – is rejected outright. So, no, he isn’t sympathetic. But the failure of the book gets him to the point of being sympathetic, since it begs the question of who Archie is without his academic accolades. And he’s going to have to figure it out soon.
What this doesn’t do is go any way towards explaining why either Katie or Sunny would still be interested in him, let alone both being inexplicably willing to upend their own lives for his sake. Sunny’s case is a bit more compelling, since she’s carrying his child, which is a defensible enough decision that even Walt can support it, provided she confirms that Archie is as committed to the idea as she is. And that’s a major stumbling block, since there’s really zero evidence that he is. Katie, meanwhile, has even less reason to care, at least not beyond her own ego, which takes some substantial knocks here.
Elizabeth is back, which doesn’t help. When Katie puts herself up for the fast-track tenure program, Dylan tells her it’ll take five years, but Elizabeth manages to slash the wait time to a year, tipping her hand as to how much influence she has at Ludlow, given her celebrated alumnus status. And that worries Katie, since it implies that Elizabeth might have had a hand in her entire career, which, it turns out, she has. Elizabeth isn’t secretive about this. Her defence is that she just assumed Katie always knew that, as a twenty-something with no experience, she couldn’t have possibly gotten her job entirely on her own merits. But Katie hadn’t even considered it.
This is pretty essential to Katie’s pathology. Like Archie, she needs her ego to be stroked, but for entirely different reasons. She’s still smarting from her mother’s abandonment of her – more or less – and Greg’s helicopter parenting, which includes him having taken a job he didn’t want just to preserve hers. Even this upsets Katie, though. When she confronts Greg about his own involvement in Elizabeth greasing the wheels of her employment, the circumstances around his own hiring are taken as a further body blow, let alone the revelation that he has been playing online backgammon – and occasionally FaceTiming! – with Sunny’s father, Fred.
Naturally, Katie turns to Archie, whom she finds drinking bad tea in the same diner where she’s binge-eating pie. It has taken until Episode 9, but Rooster finally gets to what these two see in each other in this scene. They’re both delusional. They both need each other to inflate their own egos, to keep them comfortable and unchallenged. Katie tells Archie that she’s sure he’ll get his book published. Archie tells Katie that she’s the smartest person in any room she walks into. It’s all a bit sad, really. But it’s seemingly enough for Katie to inexplicably declare that she’s back in on their relationship. She doesn’t even give Archie time to argue against it, which I suppose would be difficult for him to do sans spine. As far as anyone’s concerned, they’re back together.
With all this, Greg feels a little consigned to the margins. As I mentioned at the top, though, that’s largely because most of what he’s doing relates to a departure that it’s very obvious isn’t going to happen. We know he’s going to have to stick around for Tommy. We know that Coach Jake, who’s now sober but newly addicted to gambling, isn’t going to be in any fit state to return to coaching the hockey team that Greg has taken over. He still has a chance with Dylan.
Surprisingly, given how little attention has been paid to it until now, a lot of Greg’s understanding of his purpose is filtered through his role in the hockey team, who are facing a big game against Pruitt, and potentially being cut by the Head of Trustees. Walt’s argument that the value of a thing isn’t always proportional to how much money it makes should hold some water, given how many of the faculty turn up at the game, and how much they enjoy what turns out to be a hard-fought victory, spurred on by Jake’s pre-game revelations about all the deplorable things he did to the kids when he was high.
But the hockey team’s success is, really, only further justification for Greg to stay, which we know he’s going to do anyway. Cristle cosying up to Jake makes it a bit easier for Greg to presumably move on to Dylan, and Katie’s wildly terrible decision-making is surely going to leave a lot of pieces that need picking up. Greg isn’t going anywhere. But I sincerely hope that Rooster is.
